Utica State Hospital

Utica State Hospital, New York's first state mental facility (opened 1843), invented the notorious Utica Crib restraint device and housed patients for reasons as minor as "sadness due to grief." Closed in 1977 and now a National Historic Landmark, the building produces screaming from the basement, footsteps in empty corridors, and faces in sealed upper-story windows.

Patients at Utica State Hospital could be committed for "sadness due to grief," "bumps on the head," or "religious excitement." Once inside, they might be locked in a Utica Crib, a wooden box eighteen inches deep, six feet long, and three feet wide with a hinged lid that latched shut. Some patients died inside them because attendants assumed they were having a tantrum when they were actually having a heart attack.

The hospital opened on January 16, 1843, as the New York State Lunatic Asylum at Utica. It was the first state-funded mental health facility in New York and one of the first in the country. The state put up $10,000. Utica residents raised the rest to build it on a 130-acre property.

The main building, called Old Main, is enormous. Greek Revival architecture with six limestone columns, each eight feet in diameter and 48 feet tall. The structure stretches over 550 feet long and 50 feet high. Captain William Clarke and Andrew Jackson Downing designed it.

The first director, Dr. Amariah Brigham, was genuinely progressive for the era. He believed mental illness came from a bad environment, not moral failure. Patients got spacious rooms, good food, exercise, and creative outlets. Brigham set up a printing press, and patients published their own literary journal called The Opal for ten volumes. He also founded the American Journal of Insanity, which eventually became the American Psychiatric Journal.

But Brigham also invented the Utica Crib as an alternative to chains. He meant well. The reality was a coffin-shaped box barely big enough for an adult body. Dr. George Alder Blumer, the third superintendent, removed every last crib from campus on January 18, 1887.

As the decades passed, the hospital's ideals eroded. Overcrowding, underfunding, and the limits of 19th-century psychiatry turned the place into something closer to a warehouse. The staff-to-patient ratio in the early years was about 1 to 10. That got worse. The 1852 fire that destroyed the building's center section didn't help.

Notable patients included Gerrit Smith, the abolitionist and financial backer of John Brown, who was committed in 1860 after Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. Clarissa Caldwell Lathrop spent two years there in the 1880s.

The last patients were transferred out in 1977. Old Main became a records archive for the New York State Office of Mental Health. It was designated a National Historic Landmark on July 30, 1989, and had been on the National Register since 1971.

The haunting reports center on the basement and the long empty corridors. People hear screaming from below ground, which given what happened in those basement treatment rooms, isn't hard to imagine a source for. Footsteps echo through hallways that have been empty for decades. During occasional public tours (a 2014 opening drew such crowds that hundreds were turned away), visitors report faces in the upper-story windows of sections that have been sealed for years.

The hospital isn't a place where specific named ghosts appear and interact. It's more like the building absorbed what happened inside it. 134 years of suffering, from well-intentioned cribs to outright neglect, left something in those limestone walls. Whether you call that a haunting or just the weight of history depends on your definition. Either way, Old Main feels different from other empty buildings. People who go inside say so consistently.

The building sits on Whitesboro Street in Utica and is not regularly open to the public. Tours happen occasionally through local preservation groups.